Read on Twitter
1/ The government *does* have an agency that can remit money at scale. It may surprise you, but it& #39;s called the IRS, who pre-COVID had disbursed 37.5 million refunds *this year* https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/05/heres-what-people-are-doing-with-their-tax-refunds.html">https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/0...
2/ PPP is desperately needed, but the process is the least efficient process imaginable. It& #39;s like an Easter Egg hunt with the most sinister possible Bunny who hid the eggs. Here& #39;s what it looks like, since, unlike your taxes, you don& #39;t file with/to the government...
3/ On the Treasury site, you can start looking for eggs...i.e., where to get your loan.
4/ That directs you to the SBA, where -- despite the fact that most people are quarantined in their homes and physical locations are irrelevant for electronic transfers -- you search by zip code.
5/ Upon entering your zip, you then see...a list of every single bank in the American universe. 57,666 banks! No idea if they are open or not, accepting applications or not, backlogged or not, etc. But...you can call each bank!
6/ The result is an even worse backlog. An SMB submits to one bank -- mind you, that means "uploads documents" that go into a likely black hole -- and hearing back nothing, submits at a second, a third...a tenth. Which overloads the banks even more with potentially "stale" apps
7/ It& #39;s probably too late to re-factor this and have things sit with, say, the IRS, who actually knows how to process this kind of volume centrally. But the simplest thing would likely be a "flag" that every bank could show/hide based on whether it has capacity and wants volume.
8/ Almost every website has a file called robots.txt (try < http://anywebsite.com"> http://anywebsite.com >/robots.txt). It has a clear set of instructions to search engines over what can and can& #39;t be crawled. It& #39;s a standard. The website can change it at any time.
9/ Some banks have too many applications. Some have too few. Some have too little Tier 1 capital to make new loans. Some have capital to spare. Without a centralized process, at least make the decentralized Rube Goldberg process better by adding a "robots.txt" equivalent
10/ Banks are being paid $10B+ to give away this money (again, don& #39;t you love the IRS now?!) and it& #39;s a disaster, where the uncertain capacity makes it even worse. Private industry can& #39;t just "solve" this overnight, but Treasury/SBA could simply filter by open/closed/available
11/ This doesn& #39;t make the application process just "work" or make eTran (backend) function, but at least it makes the Easter Egg hunt palatable and dramatically reduces the massive number of duplicates appearing while people hunt for eggs. And, maybe let the IRS do this next time
12/ Oh, and incidentally, the cost of distributing PPP via banks (which will then sell them back to the Federal Reserve...zero risk, just time/integration nightmares)...will be *more than the ANNUAL operating budget of the IRS*
